What are URL shoreteners?

Hello, today I want to talk a bit about business. We all know that Bitly is URL shortener that is probably one of the biggest in the world.

What are these anyway? Imagine, there is a URL that consists of 50 symbols. Instead of remembering entire URL, you shorten it with services like snipli.com. Then the URL becomes something like snip.ly/lll where lll are 3 random symbols. You can also provide your own “title”.

What I realy like about this service is that they also give you QR code so you can just scan it if you cannot type it. It makes everything convenient.

The use aforementioned above is quite clear but are the other ways people use URL shorteners? Let’s find out.

Mask the actual URL. There are marketers who use to mask it so a person who clicks on shortened URL does not know exactly what URL the URL will redirect to. It’s great for hiding affiliate URLs.

Other use is for SEO. Majority of URL shorteners allow 301 redirects which means that all the link juice flowing to the shortened URL will be passed to the redirected URL. This thing works.